OF HOW THE FIRST ABORIGINAL RED MAN—or woman—stumbled on
to the first green accidental tree of maize there can only be a poetic guess.
But there is written record of the curious and fundamental maize exploit of the
civilized white man, George Harrison Shull.

Shull married a maize plant to itself. By the dwarfish and
ill-begotten children of that incestuous marriage this little professor was
surprised. Through the runtish offspring of this unnatural union, consummated
by his pottering with certain paper bags, he began for the first time of all
men to trace down, to uncover pure blood lines of maize that had been
mysteriously hidden and hopelessly mixed for nobody knows how many thousands of
years. For maize Shull discovered the silliness of the superstition that like
produces like. To the breeding of the Indian corn he brought sureness—where
everything before had been as full of whims and chances as the issue from the
passion of any human boy and girl. For maize this obscure Shull was certainly a
new fantastic sort of pioneer.

It would be wrong to say George Shull was the first to try
the utterly impractical, you'd almost say impossible, stunt of fixing the
fathers an ear of maize should have. Thirty years before Shull made his
highbrow paper-bag marriages of corn at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, the
botanist Beal in Michigan was castrating maize plants, depriving them of their
manhood by pulling off their tassels.

Beal—who was a learned Quaker—was urging practical
Michigan men to try new complicated tricks of breeding maize. Tall, loathing
tobacco, proud of his austere teetotality, Beal traveled north to the Farmers'
Institute at Traverse City. The dirt men from miles around trooped into
Campbell's hall, having come in from their new-cleared land in bob-sleighs,
stamping the snow from their socks and rubbers around the red-hot big-bellied
wood stove. Professor Kedzie was going to talk to them about kerosene lamps and
illuminating oil; Professor Beal was about to instruct them in
"Horticultural Experiments and How Discoveries Are Made." But
principally these plain men were lured to this intellectual feast of 1876 by
excellent music, rendered by the Traverse City Silver Cornet Band. Little did
they know they would listen to landmark science in the breeding of maize.

Beal rose to his great height and peered at his smelly
meeting. "What do we think of a man," he asked earnestly, "who
selects the best calves, pigs, lambs, only from the best mothers, paying no
attention whatever to the selection of a good male parent?"

These Michigan men—though not polished—weren't given to
butting in on speeches or even answering these professors, their obvious
betters. And anyway they wouldn't say out loud with the women around what
they'd think of such a fool as that—and what they thought privately wouldn't
be fit to print. What would a good farmer think of a fellow who bred livestock
just from the mothers?…

With something of the owl in him, waiting like the
schoolmaster he was for his thought to sink home, Beal squinted at his grown-up
pupils dramatically. "But that," he said, "is just what our
farmers are doing now, selecting from the largest, fairest ears of corn!"

There's no record how many of his moustached listeners, with
the blended aroma of pine trees, tobacco juice, and barns in their beards,
understood the polygamous, promiscuous way of a maize plant's marrying and
begetting. Surely not many of them knew the bizarre physiology of a maize plant
being husband to a hundred wives and at the same time wife to half a hundred
husbands. Carefully Beal got all that through their heads.

"But it's only the ears—those are from the mother
plants—that you pick for seed. Yet those ears have been formed from silks that
have got pollen from every conceivable kind of father. There are lots of
slender, unthrifty stalks in your field—yet they shed pollen which blows by the
chance of the wind on to the silks of the very best plants. There are plenty of
barren stalks, that don't shoot ears at all—but they've tassels, from which
pollen goes all over the field. ... "

Well—what about it?

"What I suggest," offered this dreaming professor,
"is that you go through your fields, spotting those poor plants, and jerk
off their tassels before they shed pollen. That'll keep them from mixing their
blood with the rest of the corn."

Here was the first fanatic for corn eugenics—nearly as
foolish as modern folks who without humor advocate picking out human fathers by
science instead of letting nature do it with a sidelong look in the eye or a
pink rush of color to the face of a maid. The farmers listened—with more or
less respect. But what was this tall loon of a prof raving about, anyway? What
man had the time to go through his whole field of corn every day during the
whole two weeks or more of tasseling time—pulling off tassels from bum
stalks? How'd you know a stalk was barren? Sometimes the ears shot out very
late! And if a plant was barren—did this prof know whether or not barrenness
ran in families, whether it went down to the children? Let this feller come
out and be their hired man for a while and see how much time he'd have to be
mooching 'round in a cornfield two weeks in July—with the wheat ready to cut!

No—the skeptical farmers had a lot of sense on their side.
And even Jake Leaming, or James Reid, who in these very days were founding the
varieties of their magnificent Yellow Dent corn by the old Indian way of
picking out the finest fairest ears, couldn't have made head or tail to William
James Beal's theoretical proposals. How control the fatherhood of an ear of
maize? Here's the best corn crank, here's Jake Leaming himself, standing in the
middle of his field in high summer, standing in an invisible rain, a golden
rain of pollen that makes the air sneezy, that settles on his hands, in his
eyebrows, on the sleeves of his shirt—and on the silks of a thousand maize
trees all around him….Who'd say what pollen should go where? Who—but some
professor? Botany? All right—but Beal ought to be learnin' it to city boys in
white collars and town girls that went to college because they aimed to teach
school. Botany!

Of course it was outlandish that William Beal had ever
become a professor—it was as strange as the trick of a fine ear of corn
yielding nothing but runts and nubbin ears every now and again. Look at Beal's
father: he was one of those pioneers whose faces had the mark common to all of
the stump-grubbers and tree-fallers of those grim Michigan days—a thin-lipped
mouth drawn down at the corners. ... No highfalutin monkey business in the head of
old Beal. He helped carve Michigan out of the woods. But his boy, William
James? When he should have been sweating, this lad had gazed at the
Pottawattamie Indians, hilling up their maize, planting it year after year in
the same old hills in Lenawee County, southern Michigan. Young Beal had watched
bear pounce on the back of his father's screaming pigs and make meals off those
critters before they were dead. He'd seen myriads of cotton-tails, skunks,
squirrels, busy bothering his father's corn standing in shocks in clearings
still too rooty to plow. The boy didn't seem to care for his dad's thin-lipped
life.

So, out of this now lost lovely country, where the gray
geese trampled down the wheat near the little lakes, where the burning
log-heaps in the autumn evenings threw giant shadows on the tree rims of the
clearings, Beal bumped. He jounced away, over corduroy roads—to the University
of Michigan. Next he went east—to Harvard College, and here he had the nerve
to brace the famous Swiss-American, Louis Agassiz. "I have the ambition to
be a botanist and zoologist," William told that formidable man.

"But why do you want to study zoology?" roared
Agassiz. "There's no money in it! You must make up your mind to be poor
all your life!"

II.

NOW here is Beal, crammed full of the lore of sea-urchins
and the intimate parts of fossil fishes by this completely professorial
Agassiz. Here is Beal—a professor in the little one-building Michigan
Agricultural College at Lansing that did very well to have three professors in
all. Here you have Doctor of Philosophy William James Beal, an impractical jack
of all the sciences of horticulture, a fanatic for crossbreeding like the old
druggist of Marquis wheat fame, William Saunders, only with his feet much
farther off the ground than Saunders. This Beal will improve the Michigan corn
crop!

"To infuse new vigor into varieties, I propose in the
case of corn and other seeds to get seeds from remote parts where they have
grown for some years and to plant these different seeds near each other and so
mix them," wrote the dreamer Beal.

In the not too fertile fields close by his absurd new
college, Beal started an experiment Jake Leaming would have snorted at. From
Farmer Jacob Walton of the town of Raisin he got a White Dent corn—Walton had
kept that corn "pure" on his own farm for ten years. Farmer Hathaway,
from way off at Little Prairie Ronde, sent Beal some ears of his pet Yellow
Dent—fifteen years he'd nursed it, selected it, grown nothing but his own
maize without mixture from foreign parts.

"Too much care is needed for experiments, to trust them
to others," said Beal. So he tucked a row of white grains of the Walton corn under the ground with his own hands—he was
at least that much of a gardener. And in the row next to the Walton he planted
the yellow seed from Hathaway, and beyond that again a row of the Walton. So,
strangely, in alternate rows he planted these two sorts of corn, saw they were
well hoed, watched them shoot up with that fantastic vigor of maize in May and
June. Then came July—and what an experiment! Here is Beal, pottering up and
down between these rows of the Dent and the Walton, just as tasseling time
comes on, at the very beginning of the maize honeymoon. The intent and serious
Beal walks with dignified deliberation through his small green forest, just as
the tassels begin to send out their plumes to crown the trees of it. He starts
a brutal operation:

He jerks the tassels off the tops of the Walton corn plants.
With a hawk's eye, with a scientist's ruthlessness, with an experimenter's
care, every morning he goes, yanking the hopeful fecund tassels off the Walton
corn before they've ever a chance to shed their pollen. So he castrates the
corn of Jacob Walton.

Now the silks of this completely female Walton will have to
be fertilized by the pollen from the Hathaway of the rows on either side of it.
So Beal cross-breeds the Walton maize with the Hathaway. Now he can be
absolutely sure of both the fathers and the mothers of the Walton corn. That
autumn he husks the Walton ears, labels them. For the next spring's sowing he
stows away these cross-bred mother ears whose fathers have come all the way
from Little Prairie Ronde. Patient and long as the years is his toil.

"It is easy enough to observe isolated facts; any one
can soon learn to do that, but when you compare two or more objects, then you
take a step forward in philosophy,"—so old Louis Agassiz had counseled young
Beal, had dinned at his pupil Beal—who didn't need to be dinned at. A comparer
born, like Angus Mackay, was Beal. And next spring amid the hopeful songs of
the just-arrived meadow larks,

Beal puts his newfangled hybrid seed under the ground. Four
rows of it he plants—through the middle of a field of the prize Yellow Dent
corn, called the best in Michigan by the authorities of the Agricultural
College.

The result is superb. That fall Beal is happy, as he shells
the ears of this new Walton-Hathaway hybrid maize, weighs the seed from these
ears, measures their yield in bushels per acre, compares the yield of this new
cross-bred seed with the yield per acre of the standard Yellow Dent corn of the
college, the champion corn of Michigan, grown close by in the same field. The
comparison knocks his eye out: the result is immense: from the same amount of
space in the field that yields one hundred pounds of the college corn, the tall
professor reaps one hundred and fifty-three pounds of his hybrid—"Walton
x Hathaway." And the hybrid plants, marvelously tall, heavy-stalked, are
far and away better yielders than the average of their own parents, or than the
better of their parents!

If Beal hadn't been dignified and given to an
extraordinarily solemn peering at nature, he would have danced up and down,
given an oyster supper in honor of this event to his fellow professors. For
here was a moment in his life: here was a prophecy—based on reasoning—come
true. That's the moment in the life of any pure scientist, and Beal certainly
belonged to that breed of men. And he must be absolutely right about this
strange vigor of the hybrid children, because here came a scientific report
from across the ocean, from England, from the foremost biologist in the
universe, from Charles Darwin himself. That bearded saint of science had
brought together the seed of petunias from remote places and married them—and
the issue was much bigger and better petunias. "Ah—check !" Beal
could whisper. But here's what was finest—Beal had thought the maize stunt up
all by himself, and read about Darwin's petunias afterwards. All by himself
he'd discovered this principle of the increased vigor of these bastard maize
children—it was new. ... Only was it really new?

How long before the unscientific days of Moses had the first
experimenter bred a mare to an ass, to be amazed at the birth of the mule—more
vigorous, stronger, far huskier than either its mare mother or its jackass
father?

Well, granted—but here Beal had done the trick with plants,
not animals; here was a new way to breed maize for a record yield. But was that
new? For how many thousands of years had the Indians, by rituals, by curious
idiotic-seeming ceremonies, charged certain lone wolves of their tribes with
the growing of the pure seed of one definite sort or color of maize, far apart
from each other, far away from the villages? For how many thousand springs, at
each planting time, hadn't they then taken three or four of these sorts of seed
and put them under the ground together in one cornhill? How was that different
from the scientific experiment of William James Beal—excepting that the
professor had pulled off the tassels of one sort, confined the fathers to one
variety. ...

The Indians knew nothing of the physiology of tassels and
silks: they only had some dim notion that sexual doings occurred between their
mixed seeds, had a superstition that mixing breeds of maize pepped up the
growth of its trees—caused those trees to yield them more corn bread and hasty
pudding….

III.

"A MAN must not hesitate to throw three or four years
of experiments in the waste-basket before he appears in public"—this was
a saying of Beal. But this strange business of the vigor of cross-bred maize
children was nothing to throw into the waste-basket. "It seems to me the
greatest chance ever offered, to make a good experiment in this country for the
benefit of the farmers!" So Beal told a hard-boiled meeting of
stump-grubbers in 'seventy-seven under the elms and willows close by the lovely
ribbon of the Grand River at lonia.

He harangued them—as became a savant—on this mysterious
lustiness that appears in the first generation of the offspring begot by the
pollen of a corn from one place and conceived by the silks of a maize from
another place far distant.

Those farmers chewed at wisps of hay, thoughtfully spat
their extracts of Peerless tobacco, as Beal explained that this vigor of the
cross-bred corn didn't last, that you'd
only find it in the first year of the seed, that next year the seed from these
high-yielding children would just be ordinary corn seed again—or maybe even
worse than ordinary.

"Of course the two varieties, from each place, will
have to be crossed every year to give this high-yielding seed," lectured
Beal. "But it will be money in your pockets to plant cross-bred seed every
year. ..." he finished.

His audience broke up, went off muttering to itself under
its big straw hats—what busy farmer is going to plant two kinds of corn, every
year, for seed? What the hell? Who's going
to take the time to jerk the tassels off one sort, every day, several times a
day, for weeks during tasseling time just to get seed this here college
professor claims will yield half again as much as regular corn? And would it
yield half again as much—every year?

Even Beal couldn't swear to that. It was one of his sage
sayings that "what happens one year in an experiment may be reversed the
next. ... and experiments should be continued ten years or more."

And why should Beal's result have been anything more than a
chance? How many different traits of fatherhood were dormant in those yellow
grains of the Hathaway Yellow Dent corn? How could he be sure that the very
same fathers, which after all were distributed here and there, helter-skelter,
among millions of pollen grains—would marry the same mothers who were here and
there in hundreds of thousands of silks? Let's be kind to old Beal, tinkering
experimenter ahead of his time! He had no notion of the enormous individuality
of maize. He just had luck—the right pollen happened to nick with the right
silks the first two or three years….

Was the Walton maize pure? The Walton maize was as mixed up
as a nation of humans—a mob of ten million individual people. You might take a
broad-beamed husk of a Danish girl, marry her to a brown-eyed, heavy-shouldered
stevedore from way down south in Italy: the kids from this hybrid marriage
might turn out themselves to be heavy yielders—to have ten children apiece….Or
again some of the girl-children might be barren, and the men might turn out to
sire one or two runty children, no more. So with maize. Good old Beal had made
a grope and a stumbling step ahead: he'd wanted to give maize the right sort of
fathers—but the fathers from a variety? The grains of pollen from any variety
of maize are as numerous as the grains of white, dazzling sand on the shore of
Lake Michigan; they're as different as the sperm in the loins of the men of
America.

If William James Beal had stuck to just this one kind of
experiment he might have sensed this mixed-upness of the heredity of corn,
might have turned the trick that George Harrison Shull thought of, thirty years
later. Alas, in the years of 'seventy-nine and 'eighty, the yields of his
crossbred seed weren't nearly so phenomenally heavy. Other professors, Henry of
Wisconsin, Georgeson of Texas, Gulley of Mississippi, men he'd induced in his
first enthusiasm to try crossing corn from different parts of their own states,
didn't report good results or any results to him. And he himself had a thousand
things to do, among others he had to teach history—which he detested. And
besides, his random curiosity set him pottering at a hundred experiments:
burying seeds in the grounds in bottles "to be taken out of the ground at
a remote date to determine whether they would sprout." For years with
religious regularity Beal pruned the limbs of apple trees the twenty-fifth day
of each month of the year to see which pruning would make them thrive best. He
planted the pits of peaches diseased with the yellows. ... He crossed the flowers
of yellow and Danvers onions….He toiled at an enormous collection and
description of North American grasses—

But to breed pure the blood lines of maize, to untangle
those tangled mysterious lines—that was not a job for such a universally
curious man. There was a job for a single-minded fanatic, eating, dreaming,
sleeping, experimenting, thinking maize alone. So old Beal scratched the
surface of this strange business of the vigor of hybrids—and then his find went
to sleep, his little fact of the heavy-yielding crossbred corn was lost….But
the old gentleman botanized to the last, remained wrapped in the study and
worship of nature to the very end of his eighty-some years. To the end he
stayed poor, proud, and stern. In his last year, when he couldn't walk any
more, he still tottered outside, seated himself on a box, and sawed a definite
number of sticks of wood every morning. ... Strange as the mixed-up traits of the
maize are the quirks of men. What if Beal had put all that persistent Quaker
severity of his into the one job of mapping out the blood lines of maize? ... But
then in Beal's heyday in Michigan the folks didn't need record yields—and
discoveries have a trick of rising from the needs of men.